20/20 Vision

The Art of Contemporary University Printmaking

Tim High

Suite of the Vanity Fair Series

Upon the eve of thirty years of professional studio art practice and teaching, I have become acutely curious about many things. Among them are those rare U.S. news photographs and even rarer examples of fine art which proved to have had a pivotal and indelible influence on public attitudes / opinions, and were, in a few instances, singly able to visibly impact the flow of history. Many examples automatically come to mind that are inextricably woven into the collective gestalt of the home grown 20th century American consciousness. Video stills captured of transcontinental jetliners slamming into the two towers of the World Trade Center; lamentation over the fallen protester at Kent State University; that infamous image of horrified Vietnamese village children fleeing the napalm air strike which rapidly soured American public support of the Viet Nam War. Many other haunting or compelling images refuse to acquiesce to the forgetful frolic of post-modernity. The untiring gaze of the photographers' lens seasonally forces our eyes 'wide open' to embrace both the means and extremes of the human condition.

In many ways, the visual arts have succinctly distilled events and ideas into penetrating works. One might think of Picasso's "Guernica", the 1937 mural painting in response to the saturation bombing of the ancient capital of the Basque province during the Spanish Civil War. Or Goya's depictions of the cruelties inflicted upon his countrymen by the French in the "Disasters of War" etchings, or that mural-sized canvas he simply entitled,"The Third of May, 1808", conscripting the viewer as a timeless witness to the horror of momento mori, this time by military firing squad. Such potent works as these arouse an ocean of thought and feeling, no matter how many times the viewer visits the museum.

The emergence of modern art appropriation has been couched in a wide variety of ways and means, from a less direct re-stylization or abstraction of the original source(s), to the outrageous parody of dadaist and surrealist photo collage, and the revisionism of propagandistic overtures ranging from subliminal to the overt. For my currently on-going suite entitled "Lessons In History", I am seeking a seamless marriage of the history visual art and world history.

To achieve this effectively, I decided to remove the presumption of injecting a personal style of my own hand. My personal aesthetic finds sufficient freedom of movement not only in the selection of subject and context, but also in the manner in which a given composition is constructed and crafted. Here there are other outlets, as well, to satisify my creative urges, including the injection of needed visual images or 'props', which allow for smooth transitions between disparate elements.